Servant of the Bones by Anne Rice

Author:Anne Rice [Rice, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

16

This was a nearby city, in view of the other. The car moving through the rain was the car that had carried Esther to the place where the Evals surrounded her with their picks. Other cars traveled with it, filled with guards whose eyes roved dark and deserted buildings.

The procession was furtive yet full of authority.

Through the rain, I could actually see the shining towers of the street on which she had died. Grand as Alexandria, or Constantinople, this rock-hard capital of the Western world, New York—in its greedy nuclear splendor. Yet its soaring buildings reminded me of the weapons carried by the Evals. Hard and very sharp.

The man in the car was very proud of the car, proud of the guards who traveled with him, proud of his fine wool coat and the neat trim of his thick curly hair.

I drew in close to see him through the darkened glass: Gregory Belkin, her stepfather, founder of the Temple of the Mind of God, rich man. Rich beyond the dreams of kings in earlier times, because they couldn’t fly on magic carpets.

The car? Mercedes-Benz, and the most unusual of its kind, made from a small sedan and elongated by three perfectly welded and padded parts so that it was twice the length of the engines all around it, shiny and black, deliberately glamorous, as if carved of obsidian and polished by hand.

It prowled for blocks before stopping, the driver quick to obey the rise of Belkin’s hand.

Then this proud high priest or prophet or whatever he deemed himself stepped unaided out into the light of the street lamp as if he wanted it to shine on his youthful clean-shaven face, hair clipped short on the back of his neck like a Roman soldier, yet softly curly despite its length.

The full length of the dingy dirty block he walked, alone, past dismal boarded-up shops, past signs in Hebrew and in English, to the place he meant to visit, his guards sweeping the night before him and behind him with their glances, the raindrops standing like jewels on the shoulders of his long coat.

All right. Was he the Master? If so, how could I not know it? I didn’t like him. In my half sleep, I had seen him weep for Esther and talk of plots, and had not liked him.

Why was I so close I could touch his face? Handsome he was, no one would argue with this, and in the prime of life, square-shouldered, tall as a Norseman, though darker with jet-black eyes.

Are you the Master?

Mastermind of the Minders, that was what the flippant and cynical reporters called him, this billionaire Gregory Belkin. Now he reviewed in his head recent speeches he’d made before the bronze doors of his Manhattan Temple, “My worse fear is that they weren’t thieves at all and the necklace meant nothing to them. It’s our church they want to hurt. They are evil.”

Necklace, I thought, I had seen no necklace.

The guards who watched Gregory from their nearby cars were his “followers.

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